Virginia Tech: Facing It, Naming It

I’ve been reading your comments about the Virginia Tech tragedy, and I find them interesting. I can’t, frankly, for a minute understand how anyone could have any compassion at all for the person who murdered these people. Do you have compassion for Charles Manson? He was a mass murderer. He was pretty crazy, too. How about Hitler? His father was mean to him. I think bin Laden may have had some family issues, too.

Isn’t there any point at which a person breaks from the hearth of humanity to such an extent that he should not be let back into the house? Or, to put it another way, is there any point at which it’s time to admit that someone is evil?

Yes, evil. Give me an E. Give me a V. Give me an I. Give me an L.

Conservatives and Liberals suffer from mirror image delusions. Conservatives can be the most vile, hate-filled, miserable, foul, vicious, twisted, sick, revolting, unkind people — and they will always, always, always consider themselves virtuous. In fact, they will define virtue as that which is most like themselves and shares their hatreds. Exhibit A: Ann Coulter thinks she’s a Christian. Bring up the laugh track.

But Liberals tend to have the opposite problem. They can look at the most clearly diabolical acts the human mind ever devised and deny what they’re seeing. They’ll deny that they’re seeing something evil and try to find a way to understand it. And the way they will choose to understand it is to look inside and try to figure out a way that, under the same circumstances, maybe they could have strayed in the same way. In other words, they will confuse the evil person for someone more or less like themselves — only worse off.

The conservatives who delude themselves do so because they don’t want to face their own iniquity, so they choose vanity instead. Likewise liberals who delude themselves do so because they don’t want to face the world’s iniquity, so they choose self-flagellation. In each case, there’s a hidden weakness. And in both cases, that weakness is a form of moral cowardice.

Compassion is not the right response to a crime of this kind. Yes, understanding it is appropriate, but only as a way of guarding ourselves against such acts in the future. Compassion for the victims and the families is the only appropriate compassion here. To lump the killer in with them, in some amorphous glop of compassion, is to do them a second injustice, as though they were all part of some sad panorama, that they somehow belong together, historically and metaphysically.

In doing so, we elevate the killer to the status of Individual, and turn all the real individuals he murdered into some vague collective bad-luck entity. In fact, these were vibrant individuals who were murdered by some despicable creep who should have killed himself Sunday night and spared the world both his crimes and his presence.